


Lost in Space

by GrayJay



Series: Rex Racer on the Final Turn [4]
Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-16
Updated: 2014-12-16
Packaged: 2018-03-01 19:06:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2784284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrayJay/pseuds/GrayJay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scott is a ghost in his own apartment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost in Space

**Author's Note:**

> While this story should stand reasonably well on its own--the only continuity that make much difference is pretty easy to pick out from context--it'll make the most sense roughly concurrent to [chapter 144](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2356574/chapters/5966795) of [Rex Racer on the Final Turn](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2356574/chapters/5200295), or slightly after _X-Men_ #46.

Scott is a ghost in his own apartment: even with the bed and desk he’s hauled up, it still looks uninhabited, unreal. He doesn’t know what to do with this much space to himself--what to put on the walls, how to make it feel like a home, whether he even really wants it to. He’s got a couple vintage airshow posters--a Christmas present from Warren back when they were roommates and Scott was hunting for something to balance out the Guess girls on Warren’s side--but wherever he tries to hang them, the rest of the apartment looks even emptier, so he gives up and slides them back into their tubes.

 _It’s too much room_ , he thinks. He knows it’s ridiculous--he’s spent the last eight years in a mansion, for god’s sake--but that was someone else’s house, full of someone else’s fancy furniture and oil paintings and things with history; and all Scott has that’s really his are a laptop, two suitcases of clothes, two posters, and a manilla envelope with Alex’s letters and a handful of loose photographs. There’s a box from Alex sitting by his desk, with the battered teddy bear Alex somehow salvaged from the crash and kept for _twelve goddamn years_ ; but that doesn’t count, because he’s going to return it the second his brother shows up next weekend.

Scott spreads the photos out on the bed--a twin, which he tells himself he picked for spatial efficiency, because even admitting that he didn’t want to overoptimistically jinx _that other thing_ (which he won’t even name and tries not to think about for the same reason he won’t get a double bed) feels like overoptimism in itself. Most of the pictures are a few years old, snapshots from the old point-and-click Jean still refuses to trade in for a digital. Of the few Scott’s in, there’s only one he really likes: a photo of his and Hank’s feet poking out from under the Blackbird while they’re adjusting something on the landing gear. The Professor is in more of them than Scott remembers: in the background, eyebrow arched in token amused disapproval; in the middle of things, laughing and horsing around like one of the guys. There’s one Scott remembers taking, a few years back--the Professor and Jean leaned intently over a chessboard--that he knows Jean keeps a print of in her room. 

He looks for pictures of himself with the Professor, but only finds one. It’s older than the rest, and he’s not sure who took it--Dr. MacTaggert, probably, he thinks. It’s a great photo of Xavier: leaned forward a little in his chair, looking straight at the camera, serious save for the crinkles around his eyes. Scott considers briefly whether having it on the wall is worth having to face himself at fifteen every day, and decides it’s not.

And it’s there that it finally hits him, looking at the broken, fucked up kid he’s been trying for eight years to leave behind--the thing Scott’s been burying for weeks now, first under numb shock, and then responsibilities and arrangements, and finally the sheer overwhelming necessities of restarting his life--that Professor Xavier is dead, and he’s not coming back.

Scott’s been telling himself that he’s handling it, that he can push everything down and down and down, keep pushing until it hardens like the sedimentary rock he’s been reading up on so he can follow along with at least a little of Alex’s thesis talk. He should be used to this, he thinks, to losing people--it should get easier with practice, the way falling gets easier--and he’s trying to hold on to that even as he can feel the strange, liquid shift in the pressure behind his eyes that means he’s starting to cry; and he _doesn’t want this_ , doesn’t want to lose control, even alone.

He looks away from the photos, casts around for something, anything; but of course, there’s nothing there except for the box and the letter sitting next to it-- _someone to talk to who you don’t feel like you have to protect or lie to_ , Alex wrote, and that’s enough to send him the rest of the way over the edge. He goes through every motion carefully, mechanically, and it’s almost a point of pride that he doesn’t completely lose it until he’s all the way under the bed, curled up around Bear. At first, he’s crying because he’s thinking about the patient man in the wheelchair who showed up when Scott most desperately and hopelessly needed him, who gave him everything in his life that’s worth keeping; the seven years of conversations and advice and challenges that by now are more of who he is than even Alaska and his own father. At some point, his fingertips find the S embroidered into Bear’s foot, and then he’s crying because Alex is still _the best kid in the world_ ; because he never stops trying to reach Scott, who in turn does nothing but lie and hold him at arm’s length. And then momentum takes over, and he’s crying because he _can’t stop_ , cheek pressed into the floorboards, Bear crushed against his chest.

By the time he finally crawls back out, his mouth feels like it’s full of cotton and his head is pounding. He hopes it’s not a migraine, then changes his mind and hopes that it is, because that would at least be a distraction, an excuse to hide under the covers and not deal with anything for a little while. He washes his face and rinses off his glasses in the bathroom sink. In the mirror, his face looks weird and unfamiliar enough that he almost takes off the glasses again to get a closer look before he realizes what he’s doing, swallows four ibuprofen dry, and gets back into bed without even bothering to undress.

The photos are still in a stack on the blanket, next to Bear. Scott’s pretty sure he couldn’t cry any more even if he wanted to (which, _god_ , he never wants to again), so he pulls Bear under the covers with him, then props himself up on an elbow to goes through the rest of the stack. There are a few graduation photos, which he forces himself to take his time with; the way poking at a bruise doesn’t make it stop hurting but does get him used enough to it that he stops caring by the time he gets down to the oldest, deepest scar tissue.

He pauses on the last one, where Bobby’s halfway up an ice slide, and Jean’s got Hank hanging upside-down midair, and even Scott’s laughing as he ducks out from under Warren’s arm. Thinks about where they are now: Jean highlighting Synder and Mitchell in her Metro dorm; Warren dodging his father in Sedona. He’s most worried about Bobby, who’s both the youngest and the other one who doesn’t really have anywhere to go. Scott offered him the co-op in Queens--now officially Scott’s, and that’s another thing he’s going to have to deal with eventually--but Bobby turned him down in favor of the couch in Peter Parker’s Brooklyn walk-up. Scott’s kind of glad--Bobby doesn’t do well alone, he’s not Scott (and Scott knows that at some point he’s probably going to have to admit that he doesn’t do well alone, either; but it’s already been a really goddamn long day). Hank’s consulting in Cambridge for a few weeks, and then maybe he and Bobby can get an apartment together; and Scott glances back at the last graduation photo and thinks that if Agent Duncan pushes back against the idea of two of them in the same place, he’ll tell him to go to hell.

The last of the photos are in their own unlabeled envelope. Alex (adult, _alive_ , and it still hits him like a boot to the chest every time he thinks about that) sitting on a cliff looking windblown and happy; Alex posed, grinning, with a surfboard, as Haley leans in to make a face over his shoulder. And then there are the ones from home, the ones he still has to touch to believe that they’re really real: three pristine copies, three originals, battered and creased and--in one case--slightly singed. Scott and Alex as toddlers: Scott, brow furrowed, doing his three-year-old best to hold Alex in his lap as Alex does his best to wriggle away; Scott and Alex at eight and ten--the last summer before everything went to hell--grinning, arms around each other’s shoulders. The third, his favorite, is somewhere in between: the two of them curled up asleep in a twin bed, Alex nestled against Scott’s chest with Scott’s arm flung halfway across his face. There’s one of Scott and Christopher, absolutely filthy, standing proudly next to the half-restored Mosquito--and _Jesus_ , he’s never sure what to do with that, or the sudden simultaneous swell of pride and horror it always brings up, no matter how many times he forces himself to look--and two of the whole family. Scott looks at the last two for a long time, watching them warp and distort under the jagged neon that means it’s a migraine after all, colors he can no longer see with his eyes playing over faces he can’t touch.


End file.
